Think about this for a minute:
Parking is the single biggest land use in any city, and it’s almost completely unmanaged. Zoning requires a space for every car but ignores the homeless. In our cities, free parking is more important than affordable housing.
Here in the Marxist dystopia, we have $3 billion dollars' worth of sidewalk repairs that have been postponed for lack of funds, and there seems to be no way to find the money. Eliminating free parking and using the additional revenues for infrastructure maintenance simply makes too much sense. A lot of neighborhoods, such as mine, have already implemented permitted/preferential parking (where you pay an annual fee to park; it's $34, which is pitifully low). Extending this to every residential neighborhood while metering all commercial zones would raise a lot of money at minimal inconvenience. Sure, it's a "regressive tax," but as it raises needed revenues and incentivizes use of mass transit, the positives easily outweigh the negatives. Which is why I am guessing it'll never happen.
---Baron V
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